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It’s easy to see poor people living in public spaces and the trash that accumulates, but this is a particular way of considering impact on public spaces, with a singular disregard for the punitive nature in taking away people’s belongings because they don’t have a home to hide them in. If it’s just about trash — we know how to get rid of trash. So I ask the mayor: if ending homelessness is a defining problem of our city, shouldn’t we demand that everything that impacts the lives of unhoused people also support health and housing? To do anything less is to fall short on vision. […] Navigation teams have been sent to nine camps out of approximately 3,000 camps that have been swept. A more constructive system would send these navigation teams or other outreach workers to build possibilities with unhoused people every single time city is about to destroy their living space. Every single time. […] People need legal places to sleep. And many people actually would be well-served having nearby land to at least camp. A federal appeals court has upheld that it is inhumane to break down active camps without places for people to go. […] A policy entirely driven by complaining is destructive to our city when, in fact, many people in this city want to help. If a private entity wants to open space for camping, fast track this. In fact, staff at HUCIRP has been thinking along these lines, putting together a program for hygiene trailers. If your organization might be able to host one, I urge you to apply. I would like this program to be widely successful, but people need to know that this is possible.

“Complaints about people hopping on board without paying are among the most common we get,” the agency wrote Tuesday in the first of a series of four posts. “Starting this week, we’ll have nine new dedicated fare inspectors out on our system,” the agency’s posts continued. “They’ll be checking fares, helping riders, and making sure our system stays a safe place that is welcoming to all.” Right away, the news drew an avalanche of sarcasm-tinged public condemnation, and calls for a return to “Fareless Square”—the erstwhile free light rail and streetcar rides through downtown to the Lloyd District in Northeast Portland, gone since 2012—or even an entirely fare-free system. The Twittersphere also strongly suggested that if history is any guide, fare inspections would focus on people of color and the homeless, and other historically underserved populations. Portland mayoral candidate Sarah Iannarone waded into the mix, too, reminding TriMet that a Multnomah County judge in 2018 ruled that it was illegal to arbitrarily stop passengers on the MAX and request proof of fare.

Legalizing apartments is not a panacea. But it is a precursor to other solutions. If there are no apartments, there are no homeless shelters, no student housing, no senior housing, and no Section 8. That’s why California’s zoning override bill, the More HOMES Act, was endorsed by Habitat for Humanity and the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California, a coalition of 750 affordable-housing groups. More apartments would allow people to live closer to jobs, schools, and amenities, making transit more viable and reducing commute distances, which is good for the environment. Shorter, more-reliable commutes are also associated with greater economic mobility. Most importantly, by upzoning entire cities and states at a time, these efforts could help make sure that it isn’t only low-income neighborhoods of color—the places vulnerable to gentrification and displacement—that become hot spots for development in cities that need more housing. Whiter, richer neighborhoods that have aggressively opposed any attempts to build more housing will finally have to bear their share of the supply. […] In other words, that the burden of development is often borne by centrally located, formerly redlined communities of color is a product of the current system, in which social capital and political connections determine who gets to keep their neighborhood the same. Black, brown, and poor neighborhoods have emerged as the weakest links against enormous pent-up demand for housing, and planners (“a caretaker profession—reactive rather than proactive,” as the planner Thomas Campanella caustically put it) go with the flow. “It’s almost certainly true that more development happens in lower-income or minority communities because you can’t build any new housing—and certainly not apartments—in wealthy, white communities,” says Jenny Schuetz, a housing expert at the Brookings Institute. “Whether the rezoning changes that depends on how much opposition is straightforward zoning, and how much is the process of development.” In other words, city- and statewide rezoning might reverse the status quo, if governments succeed in stripping wealthy white neighborhoods of their powerful place in the local control system. But governments need to make sure the new rules don’t replicate the power imbalance that permeates development permitting now.

From Granger and Provorse’s perspective, the hazing is unwarranted: The crows’ droppings, they say, are barely noticeable, usually gone within a few days due to rain, and that hazing only shifts the location of the droppings to another part of the city. They also feel that the crows deserve to use the city to their advantage and that preventing them from roosting at their chosen sites may be detrimental to the health and survival of the crow population at large. But overall, they object to the hazing not “because we claim to have solid evidence that hazing the crows harms them,” Granger says, but “rather because there is no evidence at all in either direction.”